Longtime New Jersey deejay Pseu Braun was shocked to discover Sex Clark Five, a band she'd been into for decades, was from Alabama, a fact she was previously unaware of before the release of the group's new "RembrandtX" LP. "You don't normally associate
British-sounding pop with the Deep South," she says. Braun found "RembrandtX"
to be a "big leap forward with songwriting and ideas" for the Huntsville outfit and the production "more
mature." "Everything was so fresh, which leads me to believe they've always had
a philosophy and just stuck to it because if you're in group and you don't have
a direction to begin with you're not going to know what to come back to when
you regroup years later," she says.

Sex Clark Five's original lineup featured singer/electric
guitarist James Butler, acoustic guitarist/singer Rick Storey, drummer Trick
McKaha and bassist/singer Joy Johnson. Butler, Storey and McKaha were classmates at Huntsville High and had begun jamming, and they found Johnson soon after posting a "seeking bassist" notice on the bulletin board at now defunct Rocket City retailer Underground
Records.

"James and I came up with the name after going to a Who
concert in 1982," Storey, now 54, says. "So I guess spiritually I guess you
would say that was the start of the band even though it took us a couple years
to release something." (Rock critics covering the group early-on often found humor
in the fact there were only four musicians in Sex Clark Five.) The first thing
Butler and Storey, Sex Clark Five's principal songwriters, ever recorded
together was a cover of T. Rex's 1971 glittery shuffle "Jeepster." "The
production values of T. Rex were just incredible," says Storey, who outside of
music maintains a career as a graphic artist and media specialist. "These
little stripped down rock 'n' roll songs with symphony things going on in the
background, and his poetry was just riveting to us. So T. Rex worked for us for
a lot of reasons. You can ask anyone that was stirring around the time of Sex
Clark Five's genesis, if they were honest they'd have to say (T. Rex frontman)
Marc Bolan was an influence on them as well."

While Butler, now 59, and Storey share a fondness for Bolan
and Beatles, Butler feels they've bonded more over songwriting. Their creative process
typically involves Storey coming over to Cavern Studios - aka the basement in
Butler's Huntsville home, which is near Maple Hill Cemetery – to put down each
other's musical ideas to tape. They've used the same microphones and amps since
high school. A beat-up Tascam four-track cassette recorder used to track "Strum
and Drum!" may be missing a couple of buttons, but it still sees use to this
day.

"We don't write songs we write cartoons," says Butler, who
crafts his guitar parts on a Telecaster. "What do songwriters do? They look
around them and they look at the world and look at romance, politics, culture,
history. And by the time all that gets worked through the prism of our
songwriting it becomes something else – World War II becomes a Looney Tune and
a broken heart becomes a Merry Melody. We don't take anything seriously. Of
course, reality breaks through occasionally but we try to keep it absurd."

Indeed, one of the things Storey credits for he and Butler's
long-running musical partnership is sharing a "similarly bizarre sense of
humor." Storey fondly describes Johnson's female-treble vocals as having been essential
to realizing their vision for Sex Clark Five's vocal-harmony-heavy sound, and compares McKaha's "fearless"
drumming to the great Keith Moon's. After a few years apart, the original Sex
Clark Five lineup reunited in 2011 for a set at Birmingham's Alabama Theatre,
organized by Oxford American magazine, which had included Sex Clark Five in a
special issue dedicated to Alabama music, which also featured newer,
buzzed-about acts G-Side and Phosphorescent.

"We organized for a short period and practiced and it was
magical again," Storey says. "I don't see Trick and Joy very often but I still
regard them as great friends. They pretty much wanted to do other things, musically
and non-musically, and that's why we're apart."

To cut "RembrandtX," Sex Clark Five returned in Butler's basement
studio, with Laura E. Lee assuming the bass/vocal spot previously held by
Johnson. Butler declines to say who played drums on the album, although he
hastens to mention the original lineup got together again to rehearse for an
Athens, Ga. gig that ended up falling through.

On a recent afternoon, Butler explains his band's long
gestating albums this way: "Well, there's a certain amount of time required to
compose the material of course, and when we make an album it's a serious sort
of artistic undertaking, if you will. And it takes a lot of energy. So when
we're done with one it takes a little while to recover. Actually we're already working on a new album now. That rule may not apply anymore."

Butler says the next Sex Clark Five album pivots on a
rock-opera entitled "Ghost Brigade," the title track of which is the closing
number on "WFMU Radio Session Monster Strum & Drum Hits," which the
band recorded especially for Braun to broadcast on "Pseu's Thing With A Hook" -
her show in which she spins melodic tracks from acts including The Raspberries,
The Move and Badfinger - as a thank you for being one of the first deejays to
air "RembrandtX" tunes. "WFMU Radio Session" features covers (T. Rex, The
Hollies), outtakes, pre-Sex Clark Five punk-influenced cuts, new versions of
previous Sex Clark Five songs and other curiosities.